My first Codenvy experience

Last year I have asked Divine to give me a chance to learn Cloud Development and recently my intention has got manifested. Thanks Divine! What happened was I was given a short assignment to quickly build one Web Application to read a CSV file and then display the data to webpage. The web application offers one function to the user, which is to allow users to select a specific date to filter the CSV data.

The thing about Codenvy is it puts everything on CLOUD! What I like most is the IDE itself is integrated with a lot of handy tools such as PAAS platforms and GitHub! 

What you need to do is just sign up! Then start coding! I picked up Spring MVC & JQuery in just one day! Imagine how this WEB IDE helped us to pick up new skill fast! Anyway of course my strong foundation in JavaScript and Java have contributed to my speed learning also. 

Here I list down my views on using Web IDE Codenvy: 

Pros

1. The IDE is fully integrated with PAAS platforms and Github. 
2. Code from anywhere with Internet and Browser! Your code will always be in the CLOUD! 
3. IDE provides the appropriate directory structures and libraries with some sample code! This plus the fully integrated environment help the developer to avoid spending time in setting up the coding environment. 

Cons

1. No auto suggestion. If you are using local IDE, you will find the auto suggestion helpful! With auto suggestion feature you don't need to go back to the API doc to find out if a certain variable or method is available to certain class. You just type dot and it will just pop out the selection list for you. Unfortunately Codenvy does not have this feature. 
2. You cannot print to Console. Somehow System.out.print does not work for Codenvy. You will not be able to see anything in the console if you are using the System.out.print command. 
3. No instant compilation. Instant compilation is very important to developer. I have wasted a lot of time to figure out what's wrong with my code to cause the compilation error without the help of instant compilation function. I strongly suggest Codenvy to include this feature in future because this is too important! 
4. You cannot use Call Hierarchy. Call Hierarchy is one of my favorite way to understand a program flow easily! It is very helpful when the developer needs to troubleshoot the program.  

Now I am serious about Design Pattern

I know it is kinda late. I have been writing program following a code structure defined by some other team many years back and somehow I did not go find out what are the design patterns.

As you all know design patterns are meant to solve common programming problems in the area of program's stucture, program's behaviour and etc. I have studied all the design patterns before but without really using them, I do not rally remember them too much. The problem is whether  is if design pattern really needed in the developer's environment.

Recently I found out that actually I did use design pattern without me knowing about it. LOL. What I can identify now is the Bridge Design Pattern where in my code I created a lot of interfaces to group all the commonly used methods from different classes together. For the detail explanation of the Bridge Design Pattern you may just read about it here ---> Bridge Design Pattern

In fact, I have also used the Factory Design Pattern. This helps optimize the program's memory consumption by reducing the number of times of "instantiation". For details you may just read up Factory Design Pattern.

By the way there are something called "Architectural Pattern" aslo. This is useful for higher level end to end solution.